Adventures in Teaching Kids How to Code

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Countdown to Space Mission

Today we are launching two weeks of space-themed celebrations! Yay Space! Code Club are counting down to the launch of the rockets which will be taking some fantastic Astro-Pi experiments, and British Astronaut Tim Peake, into the stratosphere and beyond to join the International Space Station.

The countdown begins…

Last year, the Raspberry Pi Foundation ran the “Astro-Pi” competition, which gave children in the UK the chance to devise coding and computer science experiments for Tim Peake to run aboard the ISS.

The competition winners, which included a Code Club from Cranmere Primary School in Surrey, were announced in July this year. On 3rd December, their experiments are going to be launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Base in Florida on Orbital Sciences’ Cygnus cargo freighter. When they arrive at the ISS they’ll be put into action for a number of weeks.

Kids’ code in space… how awesome is that!

Following on from the Astro-Pi projects, on 15th December British Astronaut Tim Peake will make his own journey to the ISS. He’ll be travelling from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

How are Code Club celebrating?

To celebrate all this exciting and pioneering space activity, we’ve created some awesome resources for you to use in your Code Clubs, or at home.

In this project, children will learn how to use decisions (if…else blocks) to ask the player space trivia, using the answer they provide to tell them whether they’re correct. They’ll also use a variable to keep track of the player’s score.

We’ll publish our second space project next week, so keep an eye out for more info soon!

DIY activities

Have a go at making a DIY space helmet – the perfect addition to get you excited about the ISS launch! Download our simple visual instructions here, and get crafty!

Next week we’ll be publishing another DIY space activity. Stay tuned for further details!

Share your activity with us

If you’d like to take part in our celebrations counting down to the launch, then we’d love to see your coding and crafting creations! Share them with us online on Facebook, or by tweeting us with your Code Club’s customised projects or photos.

You can also share your Scratch projects using the tag “SpaceMission”.